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Stowing a shield takes an action. Dropping a shield (or anything else in your hands) doesn't take an action, according to RAI and Jeremy's twitter, though I think RAW is silent about it. And this is why I don't bother talking about exactly what's in your hands. :) What's in your hands...

Practially speaking, in 5e at least, action economy is the big limiter. RAW, a character could already drop a shield wielded in one hand, attack with their two-handed weapon, and then use their free item interaction to pick up their shield again. I'm just not bothering to make someone account...

Anything having to do with needing to track what you're holding in your hands. I am not going to get persnickety about what you're wielding. It's not fun and I refuse to "well, actually..." someone who just wanted to make an attack or cast a spell.

That makes sense. People watching a movie don't want to be reminded they're watching a movie. People reading a book don't want to be reminded they're reading a book. Performers on stage don't want the audience to see that it's just a stage. If you're telling scary stories around a campfire, no...

This is part of the divergence. "Here's an amazing combat toy." "Well, that's not really what I'm looking for." "What are you talking about, you can use it for more than just combat if you want, and most of the important rules are about combat anyway!" The fluff was never just fluff. It was...

This is a pretty nice example of the divergence I'm talking about. 4e monsters were great as elements of combat on a minis grid. 4e monsters were not so great as, say, world-building props. 2e's monsters are probably the best example of that. What is a D&D monster for? Well, ultimately, for...

I'd suggest that the designers' view of what was busted was different, perhaps in major ways, from the players' view of what was busted. Like, 4e codified the Fighter as a Defender and gave it a mark mechanic. I can imagine that this was fixing a 3e problem, a problem that late 3e also tried to...

It's interesting to me that the most generic class - Fighter - is also one of the most popular. Kind of wonder if there's meaning in that correlation. But yes, Fighters don't have much of an identity as a class. A lot of different identities can roll up to the Fighter class, but if we were to...

I think there's some nuance in this. One of 4e's problems was definitely that it changed the rules and the setting...and then still called itself D&D. One of the loud complaints (that I don't personally agree with, but saw a lot of) is that this game wasn't the D&D that people wanted and...

There is no such thing as a necessary class. There are useful classes for various things. The Ranger is a useful class. There's an argument for including it. "Niche" is not a reason for a class.

I'd actually go the opposite route. When an aasimar or tiefling disguises themselves and passes as human, it's the "normal world." The assumption is that this character isn't treated as anything more remarkable than an elf or a dwarf. "This is a human" is something that people assume...

Part of what I like about the lore I favor for aasimar is that they are mostly human. They come from human families, they have normal human upbringings, and most of them, probably, in the right outfit, could mostly pass for human. In fact, making a "human disguise" is probably an important skill...

My favorite lore for aasimar is the big question of "What do you do when the world expects you to be perfect?" It goes like this: Mortals were never meant to go to the outer planes. They're beings of flesh, bone, blood, substance, elements. The outer planes aren't good places for things of...

The Henriad would like a word.

I kind of love the janky weirdness of Greyhawk's names. Wee Jass, Flanaess, Nyr Dyv, Baklunish, Oerik, Aerdy... They ain't easy on the spellcheck or the pronunciation, I think, but they're pretty memorable in their own way.

Here's their blurb from Saltmarsh:

Sometimes putting racists in your magical elf escapist fantasy is not the way. It's something a lot of folks deal with in real life, and isn't always fun times to put that in your game. Y'know, like how if you lost a parents as a kid it might be kind of not fun to face an enemy called the...

In the game as it currently exists, that line is crossed at about level 1 and it only gets wilder from there. A "regular person in real life" in D&D is a commoner with straight 10's. Maybe you can beat a scrappy kobold or something, but even having a 15 in a stat is beyond what a regular person...

It's a relative perspective. :) Like, using facing is more tactical, but not using facing allows for things in the description of an effect like a sudden turn, a pivot, something out of the corner of your eye. I mean, it's not true of me (someone who would be glad to see an official 5e...

It's a genre limitation, sure. The genre D&D trucks in includes heroes who can sustain life-threatening injuries and then mostly sleep them off or shrug off long-term effects (even if your HP isn't meat, you can still nearly die from losing it, and then be fine after a night's sleep - there's no...